


and autumn comes when you're not yet done (with the summer passing by)

by lavitanuova



Series: someone will remember us [1]
Category: 13th Century CE RPF, La Divina Commedia | The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Genre: Gen, mutilating canon and then throwing it in a blender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27540388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavitanuova/pseuds/lavitanuova
Summary: there are many names in historybut none of them are ours.- richard siken==the author follows in the grand tradition of falsifying letters from one gemma donati.
Relationships: Dante Aligheri & Gemma Donati
Series: someone will remember us [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2012983
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	and autumn comes when you're not yet done (with the summer passing by)

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to the modernish dante au that isn't actually a dante au but it started off as being one before it ran away from me. posting this as fic for clout in the wildly thriving tag of [checks] 13th Century RPF  
> title from francis forever by mitski  
> content warning for transphobia & homophobia

My friend,

~~Are you okay?~~

~~I miss you-~~

~~I'm sorry-~~

* * *

When the two of us were young, we would spend hours in the backs of old and dusty bookstores, only leaving when the owner chased us out at closing. Do you remember? Of course you do. I would rush through paperback sci fi, a new one every weekend, while you spent months reading and rereading books in Greek and Latin and strange old languages. Sometimes I looked over your shoulder, and you would tell me about Hero and Psyche or Orpheus and Eurydice, and in turn I regaled you with stories I unabashedly stole from Wells and Verne.

As a child, I was utterly sure that I would end up marrying you. I knew couples were boys and girls who fell in love and chose to spend their lives with one another, but at that age I couldn't tell what was romance and what was friendship. I cut out wedding gowns from magazines and dreamt of the places we would go on our honeymoon. We had talked about travelling the world together once, didn't we? We would go visit Mantua and Athens and New York, act like obnoxious tourists, eat fantastic food. And after that we would go to the same university where you would study literature while I studied medicine, and we would live happily ever after, just the two of us, our love unshakable against the world.

That bookstore on the street corner is gone. The owner- that man with snow-white hair, always smoking a cigar- he died seven years ago. Someone bought the store, tore it down and turned it into a pub. I've read the articles you published. We hate this city and love it in equal measure, don’t we? It’s a strange and desolate place, smog from the factories choking the air, turning lines on faces black with soot. The politicians are still squabbling, same as they always were, trying to heal a government crippled by what you would call an ‘acute lack of compassion’. But it’s still our city, and in every cobblestone path and crumbling brick building we see our childhood reflected back at us.

I think, for both of us, our childhood ended when you left. 

* * *

How could they stand to do what they did to you? You were seventeen, then, with wide brown eyes the colour of calla lilies, and you slid paper cups over insects instead of crushing them. Do you remember that day when you'd found that lost kitten on the corner of Fifth Street? It looked up at you from inside its box, and you fell in love in an instant. You kept it in your room and let it shred your bedsheets, and the moment I had mended them, it would destroy another. Virgil, you called it, though George was fairly sure it was a girl. He was the only one of your friends you had revealed its existence to apart from me, and you swore us to secrecy on pain of death and Virgil's tiny claws.

We kept that cat after you left, George and I, and he took it all the way to college in New England. I still get letters from him sometimes, but lately they've tapered off. Perhaps you know why. He was always more your friend than mine, and even when it was just the two of us there was a gap between our hands with your name written on it.

(You loved that cat like you loved everything else in this godforsaken city. When my father told me never to speak to you again, was that a kind of love as well?) 

Our story is a love story—but not in the conventional sense. It is a story of love towards cities, towards daughters, towards cats. 

It is a story of love that was not enough. 

* * *

I never called you by your real name when you were here. If I could live my life a second time, I'd say it every minute of the day, whispering it in your ear so the city couldn't overhear us. 

Celeste. Celeste. Celeste. 

If we meet each other again, would you let me braid your hair? 

* * *

_It was for the best,_ my father said. _Listen, darling, you're not a child anymore. You're seventeen, nearly eighteen. One day you will be a good man's wife, but before that you must learn how to grow up. The more you hold on to him, the more he rots you with sin. You must leave him behind, the way a tree is pruned of its branches. I trust you remember Genesis 19. The story of Lot's wife. When she turned to look back at the city she fled, she was transformed into a pillar of salt._ He laughed, continued, _You don't want to be salt, do you?_ and I nodded.

_I love you, darling, and I'm proud of you._

He would not love me now, the way I am. I did everything he asked of me, never dreamed to look behind, and yet the stain of the fallen city is still on my clothes— in a manner of speaking. When I realised this, everything else came quite easily. If I was sinful for this, if I was going to Hell for loving women, I could do nothing to change this. If I was a sinner, why should I not sin? And if I should sin, what better way to do it than to reconnect with an old friend? 

No, that's not quite right. 

The truth, the real, awful truth is that I am not sending this letter to you. I do not know your address, I do not know your phone number- you may be anywhere on Earth or nowhere at all. There is a chance that I will never see you again, and in all likelihood it is not a chance but a truth. When I visit your mother, they have cut your face out from the family photographs. Some days I believe them, some days I think you do not exist, that I have invented this story of us, and that my father is right and I teeter on the precipice of my own sanity, clinging to a childhood long gone. I am to be married next month, and already I see my future laid out in front of me in the stain of wine and the cry of children. You must not care, you have been through worse, but to tell the truth I’m scared, Celeste, I’m so scared and I don’t know what to do.

My life from next month on will be in typewritten letters squirreled away, in lipstick stains cleaned hastily with soap, in a thousand tiny things that no one can see. There is nowhere for me to run, nowhere at all except the grave, and you know what happened to Beatrice- they wrote on her gravestone _obedient daughter_ as if she was nothing else. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person but I wish I had your courage. I wish I had run into the great unknown with you, salting the earth behind us, but I’m not seventeen anymore. My father wishes me to marry, and so I shall, because even though I do not love him he is still my father, and he tucked me into bed and fed me sweets and did everything that a father should for his child, especially a father alone. He gave me the world- so I must give it back to him, even if I hate it, even if I spend the rest of my life hating it.

It is what I have to do.

* * *

When I was a little girl, I could not tell love and friendship apart. But there was nothing to tell apart, was there? The movies and the gramophone tell you how to leave a lover, but they say nothing of a friend.

I still remember what you told me that long-ago afternoon, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Eurydice died, Orpheus could not stand to live a day without her, and descended into the underworld to bring her back to life. He didn’t succeed, but you told me that wasn’t important. What was important was the trying. What was important was the love.

That bright hot summer day, eating peaches in the shade of an oak tree, I would have followed you to Hell and back. But we’re not young any longer, and all the love in this city left with you.

Maybe you’ll come to my wedding.

Gemma.


End file.
